The good news about Donald Trump’s efforts to take control of the upcoming election is that the legal changes he’s seeking to make won’t get through the Congress. The bad news is that his illegal efforts might succeed.
When Trump first raised the topic on a podcast over the weekend, his own press secretary felt compelled to say he was only referring to his support for the SAVE Act, now pending before Congress, which would require a raft of documentation from those trying to register to vote. Given the 60-vote threshold that the bill will run up against in the Senate, however, the nation will be saved from SAVE by Democratic opposition.
Similarly, Trump has no legal authority to get states to send him their voter rolls, which he fairly lusts after so he can strike likely Democratic voters from these lists. That absence of legal authority was rather glaringly revealed last week when Attorney General Pam Bondi offered Minnesota a deal: If the state just forked over its rolls, she hinted that the administration might just withdraw its ICE and Border Patrol goons. No administration action has revealed so starkly as Bondi’s ploy the fear Trump harbors about the coming election, and the absence of legal channels available to him to rig or curtail it.
As we’ve seen in Atlanta over the weekend, Trump can use the FBI to try to seize ballots, though he’s being sued by local government officials over that action. Come November, he could, I suppose, send in the feds to stop the vote counting in Democratic cities (and keep in mind that virtually every large American city is heavily Democratic). The problem with that is that if an urban county can’t certify its votes, neither can the state in which it’s located certify its votes. Impounding the ballots in, say, Harris County (Houston and its suburbs) means that Texas can’t certify its statewide election results for senator, governor, and its members of Congress and the legislature. Trump would probably be fine with that if he’d interceded in so many states that the new Congress couldn’t convene, but it’s hard to imagine that Republican elected officials would feel the same way.
In fact, a rift has already opened between Republicans on Capitol Hill, in various statehouses, and even in the West Wing, on the one hand, and Trump himself over the extreme measures he’s advocated for rigging the election. The GOP’s Senate majority leader, John Thune, has pointedly noted that the Constitution vests the administration of elections in the states, not the federal government. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s attempts to walk back Trump’s podcast comments made clear that much of the White House staff isn’t on board with overt election-rigging and denial, either.
On Tap This story first appeared in the On Tap newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson.
We’ve seen this rift once before: on January 6, 2021, when Trump’s staff, congressional Republicans, Fox News hosts, and his own daughter implored him to tell the insurrectionists who were running amok in the Capitol to leave, and Trump resisted their pleas for hours. It’s emerging again on what is essentially the same issue: Trump’s determination to rig or overturn election results that diminish or truncate his power though any means possible.
What those means could be were spelled out by sometime Trump consigliere Steve Bannon earlier this week: deploying ICE and the Border Patrol around polling places in Democratic precincts on Election Day this November. Since ICE and the Border Patrol have a sterling record of attacking and apprehending citizens as well as undocumented immigrants, they’d likely do the same on Election Day—actually, attacking and arresting citizens would be their sole focus on Election Day, since every survey undertaken by Republican administrations, as well as everyone else, has failed to find noncitizens who actually vote in U.S. elections.
To halt such deployments, Democrats would have to get orders from federal judges barring ICE, the Border Patrol, and other such thugs from proximity to polling places, or even from Latino communities and blue cities generally on Election Day. Those court orders would have to come down before Election Day (or, in places where pre–Election Day voting has been established, before those days as well); orders issued on Election Day itself would come too late to stop deployments. The administration would doubtless argue that any state or county seeking such orders was obviously trying to encourage voting by noncitizens; but given the turn in public opinion against the deployment of Trump’s goons in America’s cities, I doubt that argument would be accepted by any but the MAGA faithful. At all events, Democratic lawyers should prepare to be in court before Election Day rolls around to preserve the sanctity of polling places and of Americans’ right to vote, and should have handy the innumerable studies documenting the nonexistence of noncitizen voting.
As on January 6th, Trump will do anything and everything, regardless of law, to keep his hold on Congress in the November election—even if, as on January 6th, he has little to no support from fellow Republicans and his own staff. That’s the threat against which the American people must be arrayed.
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